#* // psa

[rigby-id-dotofficial]

This is so cool! Collections like these rock, but make sure if you happen to gain an interest in collecting road signs that you so not take ones you find on the street! That is considered theft and can result in fines, jail time, and strike on your criminal record! That is why, on Monday, June 15th on my day off I did not pull over and collect a bright teal traffic cone because it was a "shiny" as that would be illegal and mean I would lose my job.

Remember! Safety is everyone's responsibility 💖

Collection of exit and fire safety signs

[tiny-icky-whore]

dear tumblr,

i am fully aware that i am a midsized girlie and that is not everyone’s type! however, just because i’m not your type doesn’t reserve you the right to leave hateful asks :) get off anon and say it to my face! sending love to the almost 3k people who enjoy my posts enough to follow <33

ps: anything hurtful you can say to me is probably something i’ve already heard and laughed at. ur not original. sorry pookie !!

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

since new year is around the corner, here’s a very important reminder to be mindful and considerate when it comes to fireworks because hundreds of animals, especially strays, sadly lose their lives every year due to the fear and anxiety they endure. hundreds of pets got so terrified they ran away from homes.

please make sure your pets are safe. please make sure to think about stray animals who don’t have homes to take shelter.

please think about them too.

*I’m obviously not saying you can’t celebrate new years or that fireworks should be banned. I’m only asking for all of us to be considerate of animals who experience fear so intense their hearts literally stop; a celebration should not cause innocent animals’ lives, fireworks are not worth the lives of innocent animals. so please be considerate and think about them too.

[sgiandubh]

Thank you...

...for all your warm Christmas wishes, on this page or in DMs. You have been many to reach out and I don't know if I will find the time to properly answer each and every one of them, but they have been read and shared with great pleasure and gratitude.

Here are Bonnie & Clyde Lola (R) and Paco, aka Baby (L), waiting for Santa on the living room couch. Spoiler: he didn't disappoint.

PS: I don't know which one of those trigger the most some people across the street: our books or our antiques?

[icara-mack]

hoooooly shit

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

[paracosmic-gt]

@/songsofthedisturbed

@/wewillbeseen-butnotbeheard

Possibly same person under a different account. Posting/reblogging horrible content against alterhumans including the r slur. What they're doing is dangerous. I get being uncomfortable but they are going to trigger someone into a bad space with their reality checking attempts.

They say they understand suicidality over dysphoria but seem intent on making others suicidal too. They refuse to seek help or disengage with our community.

Sending hateful anons. Please block for your safety and don't engage. We struggled deeply with suicidal dysphoria too, but this is just deeply hateful and horrible.

[oldshowbiz]

ok

[lipglossanon]

Happiest of holidays!! 🎉

I hope this finds you well! 💜

Just letting you guys know that I’m outtie for a bit! ✌️ a lot of things happening going into the new year, so I won’t be that active.

But I wanna say thank you and that I appreciate all the kindness shown to me this past year. 🥰

To my mutuals: I love seeing your posts on my dash even if I don’t interact. I don’t have the words for it, but it makes me feel fuzzy inside to see your thoughts and interests ☺️

To my anons and followers: The biggest thank you in the world! 🫂 your support means a lot, as cliché as it sounds, and I probably would’ve stopped posting on here and only stuck to ao3 if it weren’t for you guys. So again, thank you 💜 🫶

I really wish every single one of you all the best!!!!please stay safe, drink water, use chapstick, and try to make the most of what you can 💜 💜

[sirswooshnoodles]

Oh

[murderscenemotes]

For full transparency, this blog may become inactive + be deleted in a few days due to mental issues. We’re sorry to let everyone down and appreciate the support nonetheless . Thank you.

[eff-exor]

they sang nobody likes you when you’re 23, but i don’t think anyone likes you when you’re 27 either..

[the-haunted-office]

Me me me!

Considering I don't rp smut at all...

It makes me uncomfortable, for one, but mostly why I don't rp it is because I don't want it to become the focus of a ship. I've had this happen before in the past, back when I did rp smut - too many people wanting to rp smut all the time and nothing else and it frustrated me, and just got boring to me, so I don't want to rp it at all anymore. :/

I don't mind discussing our muses' sex lives and talking about how things might have gone during like, their first time together and things like that, sending Sunday memes in to each other, that's all fine, it's just the actual roleplaying of smut, writing it all out step-by-step that I don't want to do. It's tedious and boring to me and I just... don't want to get trapped in that whole "our ship is going to be nothing but smut from now on" thing again.

Plus I had some people a long time ago become personally attached to me over it and that was really uncomfortable, so I've just decided to say no across the board to it.

But everything else? I'm all for it and I'm here for it! Bring on the fluff and angst and character growth and everything else! x3

I don’t just ship for smut. 

When I say ’ I ship this ’, It’s not due to the fact I want to see yaoi or any form of smut between the pair. It’s for all the other great things. I like to build relationships. bonds, trust. And hey, the heart wrenching stuff too! That trust can be broken within seconds, shit can hit the fan, and hey let’s throw in some angst in there that will initially make our ship stronger. Sure, smut makes any roleplayer go Ajdjsdshksdjhjf but I like everything else that comes with it, the fluff, the simple moments. Tagging things that remind me of that ship, sending sweet asks or just even normal asks to build on our own characters as well as their relationship. 

That’s how I define my ships. 

[nattousan]

*doom music starts to play* I actually kindof like scheduling these kinds of appointments now...

but seriously Fellas, don't forget to schedule a pap smear every couple of years just in case. If you still have a cervix you can still get cervical cancer. ilu

this has been a psa

[meluiloth]

Since the whole thing with NaNoWriMo has gone down, I've noticed that one of their former sponsors, Ellipsus, has cut contact with NaNoWriMo because they do not support their stance on AI; I didn't know what Ellipsus was, but upon further research I've found that they are a writing platform that works a lot like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, only with a heavier leaning on the story-writing aspect and connecting with other writers - and they also completely denounce any use of AI, both in the writing process itself and in the use of their platform. I really appreciate that.

Since this is the case (and since I've noticed Google has begun implementing more AI into their software), I've decided to give Ellipsus a try to see if it's a good alternative to Google Docs (my main writing platform). It's completely free and so far, I've found it simple to use (although it is pretty minimal in its features), and I really like the look of it.

I figured I'd spread the word about this platform in case any of you writers would want to give it a try, and if you do, let me know how you like it!

[heywriters]

btw the majority of your life will be lived as a adult. yeah i don't make the rules. go have fun in your 40s or 70s or whatever. no one expects you to accomplish everything at 17 or 27. you've got time and in the meantime get some life experience, it will pay off